So I am pointing out powerful attractors and the logic that makes them likely to manifest in the future. But this should not be mistaken for a theory of economic development or a model applicable to poor, developing countries like Afghanistan.
Rather, I am offering a vision of what higher equality and freedom means, given that sound political institutions and economic advancement are already in place. In other words, we are talking about developing higher freedom, higher equality, more advanced value memes and more progressive norm systems.
Let’s try to squeeze the current argument into one of those sassy Venn diagrams (on the next page). It can be helpful to summarize what has been said thus far.
What you see in the model above is the suggested components of cultural game change, basically the stuff that determines how we live our lives within a given setting of historical circumstances. Cultural game change occurs when:
populations develop into higher effective value memes,
when there are shifts in the intimacy of control, the emotional regime and the degrees of equality, and
when there are shifts within the system of norms.
There are, as mentioned, many interactions between these forms of development. For one, the nature of the ongoing culture wars relates to a combination of which effective value memes different parts of the population gravitate towards, and which norms are currently dominant. In a society with universal suffrage and basic human rights, the culture wars will be waged around norms concerning things like abortion, gender relations and gender roles, gay marriage, and ecological awareness. In other societies, the struggles will look different—and they may take place by other means.
So what about the “forms of social penalties and rewards” ? In highly unequal societies governed by earlier emotional regimes, the norms are upheld through more brutal forms of penalties and rewards: ostracism, corporal punishment, ideas about going to heaven or hell etc. In more equal and free societies, where the underlying emotional tensions are lessened, the norms are upheld with fines, definitions of psychiatric pathology, withheld social support, withheld recognition, subtle behavioral cues, ridicule and mockery, slander etc. And you can move up and down what I have termed “the spectrum of judgment” to produce different forms of punishments and rewards.
The general “forms of emotional expression” , (i.e. how people express themselves emotionally and interact in everyday life), are shaped by the effective value memes as well as by the underlying emotional regimes and the degree of equality. In countries such as the Nordic ones, which have a considerably high degree of freedom and equality as well as high average effective value memes, you can see the emergence of more “casual” and “sensitive” forms of emotional expression as people increasingly have the luxury of being “self-revealing” and “authentic” about their inner lives and feelings. They need to think less of “saving face” and displaying markers of prestige or honor. In these settings, it is often even taken as a sign of strength and maturity to be judiciously revealing and open about one’s weaknesses, knowledge gaps and insecurities.
When these three (1. culture wars, 2. forms of social punishments and rewards, and 3. forms of emotional expression) are viewed as a totality, it becomes apparent that societies can self-organize more smoothly and intelligently if they have higher value memes, are more free and equal and have more progressive systems of norms.
But please note that purportedly “progressive” systems of norms can easily collapse and revert to “regressive” norms if they are not supported by corresponding value memes in the population—as well as by higher freedom and deeper equality. Again, Soviet communism comes to mind; the USSR had a partly progressive ideology but lacked in all the other regards (see Appendix B).
All of these factors taken together determine the nature of a society’s cultural—and psychological—development. As we have seen, it is this cultural-psychological development that must be consciously spurred, so as to match the kind of complex world-system that is emerging in the internet age .
Culture isn’t just, or even primarily, about being Japanese or Swedish, for instance. Sure, there are geographical and historical idiosyncrasies which shape collective habits, demeanors and so forth, as has been demonstrated and discussed in different ways by folks like Richard E. Nesbitt, Fons Trompenaars and Geert Hofstede. Culture is also, and I would argue primarily , a developmental issue.
Just as there are both different personality types and stages of personal psychological development, so there are types and stages of cultural development. And stage is a stronger factor than type. It explains more and it makes a much greater difference. The cultures of modern Japan and Sweden have more in common with each other than they do with medieval Japan and Sweden respectively.
At the very center of this model, I have placed cultural game change . This is the very vortex of all that has been discussed thus far—it is where all the dots connect. Metamodern politics is ultimately about building the frameworks that will evolve culture itself, that will change the games of everyday life. As an emerging global society, we must make deliberate and concerted efforts to reach higher stages of cultural development.
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And this, my suspicious friend, concludes this first part of the book. We have now pointed out some very powerful societal attractors that describe the developmental direction of society: how the state (or order) develops, how freedom develops, how equality develops, and lastly, how the norm system develops.
Again, that’s what the next stage of politics must achieve: to create the frameworks for propelling growth into higher stages of cultural and psychological development . That’s why we need the Nordic ideology (to develop a listening society) where the innermost needs and wants of people are seen and heard; where the personal truly becomes political.
We’re not supposed to follow this as a step-by-step process. The suggested developmental models show us non-linear attractor points. There are no guarantees we’ll get to higher freedom, deeper equality, a more complex self-organized order, and “more progressive” norms. But with this in mind, we can navigate the seas of history a tad more consciously—with an ironic smile at our own self-importance… and with the trembling hearts of the cautiously faithful.
Now let’s get on to the part where we start creating the institutions that can get us there. We’re going to need six new forms of politics to make this happen.
PART TWO
The Plan: Metamodern Politics
Interlude to Part Two, The Plan:
THE SIX NEW FORMS
“We often want our lives to be less complicated, which is not the same as being less complex […] The reality is that complexity is actually quite simple in its elegance. Optimizing complexity has the feeling and physical reality of harmony. It moves across time, space or potentialities, the flow of moments, with a phases flow that is literally what a choir singing in harmony feels like, as the individual members differentiate their voices in harmonic intervals, and then link them as they sing together.” [74]
The above is a quote from Daniel Siegel, the clinical professor of psychiatry who studies integration in human minds, emotions and relations. As he points out, more integrated systems can manage greater complexity, and when something manages greater complexity there is a quality of elegance and simplicity to it.
Let’s see then if we can do the corresponding move for metamodern politics; let’s see if we can identify the simple, underlying pattern that creates a more harmonious whole—within ourselves and within society at large.
We’re now entering the second part of this book: The Plan . Up until this point we’ve been doing some real weight-lifting, but now we can begin to reap the fruits of our hard labor; we will look at the six new forms of politics, the new processes that can and
should be instituted in order to make society productively transition into a metamodern stage of development.
If we manage to do that, we’re talking millions of lives saved, and yet many more lives dramatically improved—and that’s by a conservative estimate. If we don’t, immeasurable suffering is likely to follow as the world falls apart. The fate of billions depends on a successful development of politics to match the growing complexity of the world if we are to avoid social disintegration and ecological collapse. Modern politics leaves us severely underequipped at productively addressing these new life conditions that technological progress, global interconnectedness and existential threats to civilization bring about. The arena of national democracy is just too limited in scope, state legislation too feeble a tool, and governmental institutions too ill-prepared and uninformed to prevent run-amok technologies, the unrestrained powers of multinational companies and the continuous destruction of the environment from causing immense suffering and death.
Politics needs to evolve. Modern society is out of its depth; its scope is too limited and its influence too shallow to develop the cultures, psychologies and behaviors needed to keep up with its emergent structural complexity.
How dire will the consequences be if we fail? If you look across the globe, with billions of people, and over decades worth of dramatic change, is it really an exaggeration that we can save a few million lives by taking the right steps to develop our political institutions, and doing it sooner rather than later? I don’t think it is. Hence—remember: millions of lives at stake. At non-linear, long-term stake, but still.
Not to mention if we shift the norms towards animal emancipation, against animal exploitation, where we have sixty billion land animals and over a trillion aquatic animals killed each year.
When the stakes are this high, you don’t get to pretend you’re the good-guy by saying you’d just rather not relate to these issues. You are not the good-guy, you cannot remain innocent.
And yet, we must remain playful, lest we are guaranteed to experience the failures that follow from fanaticism and disastrous consequences of misguided effervescence. We must strive towards coherence and harmony, but we can’t force it to happen.
Let’s kick-start this cold engine with a quick exposé of what has been said thus far; brace thyself.
Very, Very Quick Recap
In Book One, I described the fundamentals of a metamodern political philosophy: the rise of “cultural capital” as a self-consciously organized political power, the increasing influence of the triple-H populations (hipsters, hackers and hippies), the obsoleteness and transcendence of classical Left and Right politics, the emergence of a new meta-ideology concentrated especially in the Nordic countries (Green Social Liberalism 2.0, or “the Nordic ideology”), the re-integration of the civic, personal and professional sides of life, a general both-and perspective, a transpersonal perspective of the human being, and “the view from complexity” which sees self-organizing chaos and fractals (rather than focusing on social power structures). Phew.
All of this is based upon a developmental (and dialectical) view of humanity and society; a perspective that looks at both external factors (systems, technology, economics, etc.) and internal factors (psychology, culture, spirituality and inner states)—in effect avoiding “developmental blindness” and “inner dimensions blindness”.
We saw that the psychological development of people through four dimensions (cognitive complexity, code, state and depth) largely determines their “effective value memes”, and that achieving a higher average effective value meme of the population is exceedingly important for the development of healthy postindustrial, transnational, digitized societies. A new political movement is needed to put such psychological growth on the agenda.
Such a political movement is necessary not only because it can shift the psychology of the population away from the moral and psychological deficiencies of modern society, but also because we are facing a global crisis-revolution as technological, scientific and economic developments redefine the human condition. Global society is in a stage of transition from modernity to what comes after; a moment of untold promise and terrifying risks.
The two main agents that embody and manifest this new political philosophy are “the process-oriented political party” and “the metamodern aristocracy”. The first is a more popular movement, founded upon and informed by metamodern ideas, but whose rank-and-file members are not necessarily at the Metamodern value meme. The second group, the metamodern aristocracy, is a small transnational “elite” who deeply embodies the metamodern values and ways of thinking, and who works to develop new metamodern theory and applications thereof.
Double-phew. That’s a lot of background understanding to keep in mind. And then we have spent the first part of this book fleshing out a corresponding metamodern political sociology—seeing the historical directionality of the state’s development, the developmental anatomy of political freedom, and the meaning of deeper equality, and how these categories steer the cultural struggles for emancipatory norms.
By the way. Why is this general understanding “metamodern”? Is anything Hanzi says “metamodern” by definition?
No. These theories are metamodern because they synthesize the ideas of modern progress through successive stages with a postmodern , critical sensitivity towards modern society. They offer a direction and a roadmap without relying upon a naive, materialist, linear and mechanical faith in science, rationality and humanity. There’s no statue of Lenin pointing us towards a glittering future.
Rather, the metamodern view of progress takes as its point of departure the very failures, limitations and insufferable tragedies of modern life. It is born not from the glory of the modern project, but from its frailty and futility. And more; it is born not from the postmodern critique of modern society, but from the relative fruitlessness of that very critique.
If you see that it’s not only modern society and its institutions that are futile, but that even the postmodern criticism of the same is equally so, you must also recognize that the postmodern “deconstruction” must be followed by a corresponding re -construction : We must create new visions and pathways towards a relative utopia. This is where political metamodernism enters the picture.
So now that we have enough understanding, hopefully, to see the greater context within which a metamodern political program makes sense, it’s time to get practical. The reason I didn’t rush to present this part of the work is simply that you need all the background understanding for it to make deeper sense. Taken out of its context it is not only difficult to understand, but also easy to misunderstand and thus misuse. And such misuses can be dangerous indeed.
You have to see that the six new forms of politics presented in the following are pieces of a greater puzzle; that they aim towards raising the prevalent stages of psychological development of the population as a whole, gearing life towards deeper freedom and equality—cultivating the listening society .
Processes for Deeper Societal Coherence
In the following chapters we will go through the six new forms of politics which I argue can and must emerge for society to make a successful transition from modernity to metamodernity.
You may recall from the introduction that the six form of politics proposed are:
Democratization Politics: Aims to create ongoing processes for developing and updating the system of governance and the quality of institutions.
Gemeinschaft Politics (politics of relationships and community): Aims to improve the quality of human relationships across all aspects of society.
Existential Politics: Aims to support all people on their life’s journey and spur inner growth, mental health and strong moral integrity.
Emancipation Politics: Ai
ms to create ongoing processes protecting citizens from all sorts of oppression, not least from the other new forms of politics.
Empirical Politics: Aims to evaluate all policies and institutional practices and make sure they are based on the best available evidence.
Politics of Theory (or narrative): Aims to create ongoing processes for developing and updating the narratives society relies upon, how it “brainwashes itself”.
All of these will be introduced and discussed in this order. In a last summary chapter we will also discuss how they form a larger, coherent pattern of braided streams.
What they all have in common is that they work towards a deeper interplay of (in)dividuation and integration of human behaviors, bodies and minds. In this way, they serve the development of higher value memes and to remedy many of the sufferings and sicknesses of modern life. They work towards a more listening society in which there is greater coherence of information processes, human minds and behaviors. And all of them reach deeper into the human soul and its social, relational, physiological and cultural development.
Adding new forms of politics to the list of what is thought of as “the political” is nothing new. Governments in the 19th century naturally had fewer political areas of concern than do present-day ones. Even if the US Department of Forestry can trace its history back as early as 1875, the vast majority of environmental politics has emerged during the latter part of the 20th century. Today, there are even ministers of gender equality in countries like Sweden, and governments make significant efforts to regulate, fund and maintain sports and culture of all sorts.
If we are to cultivate six new forms of politics that should become part and parcel of the institutional framework of our societies, this means we are looking at long-term developments that include the accumulation of appropriate expertise, knowledge and frameworks over decades. The issue here is that we need to make some key processes of society’s self-organization become more explicit and consciously held. We’re working towards a society in which there is coherence at a deeper level.
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